"Afraid?"
"Do you want the honest answer or the polite one?"
Logan looked at Lissandra and answered with perfect calm.
Lissandra really had made plenty of mistakes. She had betrayed her own sisters, Avarosa and Serylda. She had slaughtered Freljordians. She had used the lives of countless beings in the Freljord to seal away the Void, and more besides.
Put side by side like that, even the things Mordekaiser had done didn't seem quite as catastrophic. At worst, Mordekaiser had almost wrecked Noxus. But Lissandra? She had nearly wrecked all of Runeterra.
Because of her own desires, Lissandra had nearly brought about Runeterra's destruction. But at the same time, it was also because of her that the Void had remained sealed beneath the Howling Abyss to this day.
And sure, someone could say that the Void under the Howling Abyss had been brought there by Lissandra in the first place.
But that raised another question. Even without Lissandra, the Void would still have been coveting Runeterra. If there were no Lissandra, there would've just been someone else—some other ambitious fool stepping into the same role.
Put simply, Lissandra had indeed come terrifyingly close to becoming the ultimate traitor to Runeterra. But after she came to her senses, she also became the only person over the last ten thousand years who had truly kept fighting the Void.
Jax had spent a thousand years fighting the Void and people praised him like a living legend every time his name came up. So why, when it came to Lissandra, was the backlash always so much harsher?
Before Setaka ever dealt with the Void, Lissandra was already entangled with it. She was the first demigod on Runeterra to learn of the Void, and she had also been the one resisting it ever since.
People were complicated.
To borrow one of Camille's lines—
the world was not black and white, but a refined shade of gray.
People were the same way. Take Silco, for example. If someone wanted to list out everything he'd done, then calling him a bad person would be completely fair. If he had been dragged out and executed on the spot, it would still be true that he owed countless lives.
And yet now, Silco had become a councilor of the Twin Cities, leading them toward a better future.
The same went for Lissandra. The things she had done at different points in her life, the motives behind them, the tilt toward good or evil in each choice—none of it was simple.
Why had she borrowed the power of the Void in the first place?
Because at the time, humanity in the Freljord had already been pushed to the edge. In that ancient age, even with the help of Anivia, the Cryophoenix, humanity's living conditions were still unimaginably harsh.
Under those circumstances, the legendary Three Sisters led humanity in search of a path to survival. The eldest, Avarosa, fought the twisted powers of the Freljord. The second sister, Serylda, fought the Celestial Realm. And the youngest, Lissandra, fought the wild, thunder-roaring god.
The Three Sisters led humanity against not one demigod, but many. In the early Freljord, demigods were everywhere. If Volibear had not killed a great number of them, if Anivia had not shown mercy, if Ornn had not offered his gifts, humanity would have had almost no hope of surviving.
And in that desperate situation, Lissandra—blind, and more gifted in magic than either of her sisters—heard the voice of the Void.
Yes, Lissandra had turned to the power of the Void in order to win the war and carve out a path forward for humanity.
But the Void was uncontrollable.
Once Lissandra realized that, she chose to betray her two sisters and sacrifice most of the living beings in the Freljord in order to seal the Void beneath the frozen abyss below the land.
Lissandra was an extraordinarily complicated person. Logan had no intention of foolishly stamping her with a simple label like good or evil.
A mage who had lived for ten thousand years had done too much, lived through too much, for Logan to define or judge her so easily.
But Logan knew one thing.
When it came to the Void—when it came to the greater cause—Lissandra truly was not his enemy.
What Logan could say was that Lissandra's methods had been wrong. She had chosen the wrong way to do things. But he would never say that what she had tried to do was wrong in itself.
After all, if you traced human history back far enough, everyone alive would probably have to call Lissandra their ancestress.
"Of course I want the truth," Lissandra said.
She lifted a hand. Her pale fingers moved lightly, and two chairs formed out of ice crystal—one behind Logan, one before her.
She walked to her chair and sat down. One small bare foot slipped from beneath the hem of her white dress and swayed faintly as she gazed at Logan with calm detachment.
"In that case," Logan said, "I'm really not afraid of you."
He sat down as well.
Then he shifted uncomfortably.
Damn. It was cold.
So even in a dream, he could still feel cold... All right, Logan believed the rumors now. Lissandra really could kill people in their dreams.
"Why?" Lissandra asked.
"I don't know how long you've been watching me," Logan said evenly, "but what I can say is this, Lissandra. My understanding of this world may be lacking in details compared to yours, but when it comes to certain secrets, I know no less than you do. In fact, I think I may know more."
"You really are not from this world," Lissandra said at once, with certainty.
She looked at Logan, her sightless eyes devoid of emotion, still as dead water.
"So where exactly did you come from? There are countless spiritual realms, but the only ones truly bordering Runeterra and tied to it are the realm of the dead, the Celestial Realm, and the demonic realms."
"You, Logan... what exactly are you?"
"..."
Logan stared at Lissandra, speechless.
No, because he had every right to think she was insulting him.
What exactly was that supposed to mean, what am I?
"I am from Runeterra," Logan answered. "My name is Logan, and I come from Zaun, a city in the south of the Freljord."
Lissandra listened, then shook her head.
Her white hair had been arranged into two horn-shaped buns, with two loose locks hanging naturally in front of her forehead and brushing softly against her cheeks. She closed her empty eyes and said calmly, "You are not telling the truth."
"The moment you entered the Freljord, I entered your dreams. Logan, in those dreams, I saw things that do not belong to this world."
"What are cars? What are airplanes?"
"...!"
Logan's expression instantly stiffened.
Lissandra continued, "Computers. Skyscrapers."
"The world you speak of is not the same as the Runeterra I know. I may dwell in the Frostguard Citadel, but there are no true secrets in this world as far as I am concerned. You came from another world. You came to Runeterra from another place entirely."
"What else do you know?" Logan asked after taking a deep breath.
"Nothing more," Lissandra said. "That is all I saw in your dreams."
"Do not worry. I have no interest in the world you once came from. What I want to know is this—why do you know so much?"
"All right." Logan let out a quiet breath of relief.
That had been close.
Thankfully, he hadn't dreamed about the game. And these days he rarely dreamed about his previous life anyway. At most, he sometimes thought about adapting a few inventions from his old world and introducing them to the Twin Cities.
If Lissandra had seen him appear inside a computer screen while being controlled by someone else, Logan genuinely had no idea how he would explain that to her.
"That was rude," Logan said seriously.
"..."
A strange expression appeared on Lissandra's face. She seemed genuinely taken aback by his words. On that small, delicate face, a faint trace of emotion flickered across her features, and for a moment, she actually fell silent.
But almost immediately, she returned to normal.
"It will not happen again," she said.
"Especially since the fox behind you has already noticed me." There was a hint of amusement in Lissandra's voice.
She tilted her head at Logan and continued, "The fox warned me that if I entered your dreams again without permission and pried into your secrets, she would come for me. But I am curious—how exactly does she intend to do that?"
"She is in the Spirit Realm. Without your help, she has no way to step out, does she?"
"That's not necessarily true," Logan said, raising his voice. "Ahri only stays there because she has to maintain the stability of that world. But if she were truly angry and decided to come out, the thinning boundary between realms wouldn't be enough to stop her."
"That, I believe," Lissandra said with a nod.
But then she smiled.
It was a very faint smile, almost imperceptible, and her voice remained as calm as ever as she said, "But then that raises another issue, Logan. That fox is not weak. She is very strong. Some of the beast spirits of the Freljord are no match for her. But the problem is... she still cannot beat me."
"..."
This time, Logan was the one who fell silent.
He had always assumed Ahri wouldn't be weaker than Lissandra. But hearing Lissandra say that, Logan suddenly realized he had forgotten something.
If they were going by age, then Lissandra was far older than Ahri.
Ahri was a being born of Ionia's legends. But Lissandra had existed before humans ever appeared in Ionia.
To put it another way, even a woman like LeBlanc, who had lived for over fourteen hundred years, would still be little more than a girl in front of Lissandra.
Seeing Logan say nothing, Lissandra's smile deepened by barely a fraction.
Then she looked at him and said calmly, "Let us talk about something else."
"How much do you know about the Void?"
Logan's nerves tightened.
There it was. The real reason Lissandra had come to him.
"The Void..." Logan thought for a moment before speaking. "At its core, it is a force without life. To put it bluntly, it is basically a mass of immense energy."
"Yes. Go on."
"My understanding is that the Void itself is an unconscious force. But the Watchers guide the invasion of the Void—or maybe it's more accurate to say they act as the Void's instinct?"
"The instinct to consume, erase, and annihilate everything drives the Void to reduce all things to nothingness. It craves the matter and living beings of the physical world. It wants to devour all of it."
"Well said," Lissandra replied. "Then what do you know of the Watchers? And one more thing—do you know how the Void can be destroyed completely?"
When she asked that, there was even the faintest trace of hesitation in her voice.
Before coming here, she really had carried a sliver of hope.
Logan was mysterious—truly mysterious.
The first time he had summoned Ahri in Zaun, Lissandra had already noticed him. But the distance had been too great, and she had to watch over the Hall of the Nine at all times, so she had been unable to enter his dreams.
This time, however, Logan had come to the Freljord himself.
Of course she had chosen to enter his dreams the very first chance she got.
And after stepping into those dreams, after seeing those fragments of memory...
Yes. Logan really did know many things.
Some of them were secrets even Lissandra herself did not know.
But even so, Lissandra had still been somewhat disappointed. Logan only seemed to understand Runeterra.
Yet now, after hearing him speak of the true nature of the Void, and after hearing him mention the Watchers, a voice rose in her heart, and the hope that had nearly guttered out began to burn once more.
Could Logan possibly have some way of dealing with the Void?
"Me? Destroy the Void?" Logan looked at her in utter disbelief.
What was Lissandra even thinking?
Me, fighting the Void?
How is that any different from me picking a fight with Cthulhu?
As for how to destroy the Void—how the hell would Logan know that?
Even in Aurelion Sol's stories, a supreme being like the Star Forger still regarded the Void with a measure of caution. That alone was enough to show that destroying the Void was simply not something Runeterra was capable of doing.
That wasn't a matter of trying harder.
It was something Runeterra fundamentally could not accomplish.
But if the goal was only...
Destroying the Watchers?
"Destroying the Void is impossible, Lissandra. Surely you know that better than I do."
A trace of disappointment appeared on Lissandra's face, but she still nodded.
Yes.
Destroy the Void... what a joke.
She had suffered for eight thousand years. In all that time, she had never found a way to eliminate the Watchers, let alone the Void behind them.
"Then what about the Watchers?" she asked instead.
"The Watchers might still be possible," Logan said after thinking it over.
"After all, Shurima managed it thousands of years ago. The Void disaster in Icathia was no smaller in scale than what happened in the Freljord."
"..."
Lissandra moved her lips, then said with weary helplessness, "Icathia cannot be repeated."
Of course she knew about the Icathian catastrophe.
But that was not something that could ever be recreated.
Shurima had thrown more than a hundred Ascended into that war—more than a hundred beings with demigod-level power. It had burned through the empire's full strength. Even the empress had died on the battlefield before they finally beat the Void back.
More than a hundred demigods.
In the Freljord, even if someone dragged every hidden demigod into the open, there would only be a little over ten at most. And worse still, none of those demigods would ever willingly help Lissandra.
They all had grudges among themselves. Ornn hated Volibear. Lissandra hated Volibear. The Wolf-god and the Boar-god were enemies. The Seal-sister and the Cryophoenix did not get along...
"That may not be true," Logan said with a smile.
"The gods of the Freljord would never—" Lissandra began, shaking her head, ready to reject the idea outright.
But Logan cut her off.
"I never said we'd rely on the gods of the Freljord."
"Lissandra, just because your people skills are terrible doesn't mean mine are."
The smile on Logan's face grew wider. He thumped a hand against his chest and said:
"I know quite a few demigods, actually."
"In Runeterra alone, I could probably call in four right now. In the future, I should be able to get more than twenty. And if you count the ones from outside Runeterra, I can call in six even now."
"..."
"Huh?" Lissandra's mouth fell open.
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